By Stuart Mitchner

The youth was not conscious that he was erect upon his feet. He did not know the direction of the ground. Indeed, once he even lost the habit of balance and fell heavily.

—Stephen Crane (1871-1900), from The Red Badge of Courage

According to R.W. Stallman’s biography, Stephen Crane claimed to be prouder “of his baseball ability than some other things” even after The Red Badge of Courage had made him an international celebrity at 25. Asked how he could write about war without seeing combat, Crane once again cited baseball: “The opposing team is an enemy tribe.” A Syracuse teammate recalled that Crane played ball “with fiendish glee.” On the field, “he was constantly in motion, agile on his feet, a fast base runner.”

The Rookie

September 27, 2018: Home team behind 2-1, two outs, a fast-running rookie with only 11 Major League games under his belt comes in to run for the man on first, who had drawn a walk. The next batter hits a slow roller mishandled by the third basemen who throws wild, way wild, the ball skipping past the first baseman into the right field corner. The rookie is off and running with the crack of the bat and is already rounding second on his way to third as the right fielder chases down the ball, the home crowd on its feet, roaring, beside itself, the tying run’s about to score, and a tie means a shift in momentum, the possibility of a walk-off win in the last of the ninth, and a last gasp shot at the playoffs. Win and the home team moves on, lose and the season’s over.

Now the rookie’s rounding third, heading for home, about to beat the throw without so much as a slide, but after making a wildly wide turn at third he loses his footing and stumbles, a fatal loss of balance, going down headfirst in a falling run, a spectacularly athletic pratfall, one that Buster Keaton might have envied. In the instant replay he seems to be flying, in mid-air, before he hits the ground sprawling as if shot by a sniper and when he pushes himself to his feet it’s too late, the catcher has the ball, and the stunned rookie is tagged out standing, like the still-standing crowd staring in disbelief. Game over, everything over, for so deeply, massively demoralizing was that fall, the life has gone out of the team and the crowd, and the ninth inning has become a foregone conclusion.

A St. Louis Cardinal fan watching in real time suspects that the rookie’s fatal fall will haunt succeeding seasons, including, as it turns out, 2023, which ends with the Redbirds in last place for the first time in more than three decades. Still more likely to haunt the Cardinal front office is the fact that in 2019 the humiliated rookie was optioned for assignment to the Texas Rangers in the American League “for financial considerations.” Which is how it happened that the Cardinals did not receive a single player in return for Adolis García. In the first game of the 2023 World Series, the victim of that inglorious fall unloaded a glorious 11th-inning walk-off homerun against the Arizona Diamondbacks, giving him a total of  22 runs batted in, the most in a single postseason in Major League history, eclipsing David Freese’s 21 during the Cardinals’ 2011 World Series victory over — the Texas Rangers.

The Youth

Reading The Red Badge of Courage with the Cardinal rookie’s ill-fated run in mind, I followed Crane’s protagonist Henry Fleming (“the youth”) looking for indications of Crane’s “enemy tribe” mentality and sports metaphors in general. In Chapter 19  “the youth ran like a madman to reach the woods before a bullet could discover him. He ducked his head low, like a football player.” In the next paragraph, Crane has the youth charging ahead, as if on his way to the combat equivalent of a touchdown, the ultimate goal in football, a game Crane reportedly played as passionately as he did baseball: “Within him, as he hurled himself forward, was born a love, a despairing fondness for this flag which was near him. It was a creation of beauty and invulnerability.” And when the youth does eventually wrest the flag from the grasp of a mortally wounded color sergeant, the move has grisly overtones of a forced fumble as “the dead man seemed to be obstinately tugging, in hideous and awful ways, for the possession of the flag.”

Fighting for the Flag

A probable real-life inspiration for the moment the youth takes possession of the flag can be found in a letter from Crane to a freshman classmate at Lafayette College in the fall of 1890: “I send you a piece of the banner we took away from the Sophemores [sic] last week. It don’t look like much does it? Only an old rag, ain’t it? But just remember I got a black and blue nose, a barked shin, skin off my hands and a lame shoulder, in the row [and] you can appreciate it.”

Brutal Irony

In Chapter 11, a fall follows the moment the youth receives his “red badge of courage,” a brutal irony since the wound signified by “red badge” comes not from the enemy but from the “fierce swing” of a fleeing fellow Union soldier’s rifle: “It crushed upon the youth’s head. The man ran on.” Crane endows the blow with mythic enormity: “He saw the flaming wings of lightning flash before his vision. There was a deadening rumble of thunder within his head,” and suddenly “his legs seemed to die. He sank writhing to the ground. He tried to arise. In his efforts against the numbing pain he was like a man wrestling with a creature of the air.” It becomes “a sinister struggle”: “Sometimes he would achieve a position half erect, battle with the air for a moment, and then fall again, grabbing at the grass. His face was of a clammy pallor. Deep groans were wrenched from him. At last, with a twisting movement, he got upon his hands and knees, and from thence, like a babe trying to walk, to his feet. Pressing his hands to his temples he went lurching over the grass.”

Though Crane’s college football career has not received as much attention as the sport that was his first love, he must have been tackled hard enough to cause wounds equal to the “black and blue,” “barked shin,” skinned hands, and “lame shoulder” suffered during a freshman-sophomore tug of war. And if he was as fast a runner as legend has it, he’d have stolen his share of bases, hitting the ground hard, whether sliding feet first or head first.

Another sudden loss of balance, in Chapter 17, reminded me of the rookie’s stumble on the basepaths: “The youth was not conscious that he was erect upon his feet. He did not know the direction of the ground. Indeed, once he even lost the habit of balance and fell heavily. He was up again immediately. One thought went through the chaos of his brain at the time. He wondered if he had fallen because he had been shot.”

Sliding

When I played baseball with neighborhood friends in the days before Babe Ruth and Little League, I loved to slide, which is strange to think of at an age when balance is a precious, life or death commodity. Even more than making a great catch or delivering a solid hit, there was something heroic, romantic, even cinematic about throwing yourself to the ground to beat the throw, like a soldier ducking enemy gunfire. It’s still one of the moves I enjoy vicariously, especially headfirst slides, a specialty of the 1934 Gas House Gang Cardinals. Perhaps Adolis García, the speedy rookie who evolved into a playoff slugger of heroic proportions, occasionally reimagines that sprawling stumble into a triumphant game-saving headfirst slide. But then his true value was not his speed but his power. Watch him making that wide, wide turn at third, you see a big man with the build of a power hitter. So why he was inserted into a do-or-die situation as a runner?

“Heart and Soul”

At this writing, the Texas Rangers are concerned because Adolis García left Game 3 of the World Series with “left side tightness after taking an awkward swing on a flyout to center field in the eighth inning,” according to mlb.news. “He immediately grimaced and grabbed his lower back after making contact.” As the article points out, “García has made the Rangers’ offense hum all October. He’s hit eight home runs this postseason and … any missed time, or even a version of García at less than full strength, would be a significant loss for Texas.”

In the super-superstitious realm of baseball, will anyone but García recall that his stumble also happened in the eighth inning? Late Tuesday, it was announced that García will miss the rest of the World Series.

Humanity

After a year at LaFayette College, where he starred as a catcher, Crane transferred to Syracuse University, shifting from catcher to shortstop, where he excelled. There was even some talk that he was professional material. The Syracuse Stars indicated interest, but nothing came of it because he never tried out: He left school after the semester to become a writer.

Said Crane in 1896, a year after the publication of The Red Badge of Courage, “I did little work in school, but confined my abilities, such as they were, to the diamond. Not that I disliked books, but the cut-and-dried curriculum of the college did not appeal to me. Humanity was a much more interesting study.”